Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Prof. Paolo Lugli and Dr. Daniela Baierl from Technische Universität München (TUM) announced an image sensor based on a photosensitive polymer layer sprayed on top on the silicon ROIC. Another advantage of the plastic sensors is that different chemical compounds can be used to capture different parts of the light spectrum. For example, the PCBM and P3HT polymers are ideal for the detection of visible light. Other organic compounds, like squaraine dyes, are sensitive to light in the near-infrared region. Details are published in a paper in Nature journal:

Influence of silicon photogeneration in a PCBM:P3HT
detector. Images, showing a horse, acquired by the
hybrid CMOS-detector with a P3HT:PCBM bulk heterojunction.
The left one is acquired by illumination with green light
(535 nm), the other with a NIR-LED at 850 nm.